Border Patrol

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"It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue." —Zork

Video game developers are responsible for producing ways to keep the player from wandering away from the game world. Now, assuming you don't have to deal with Player Characters that can fly, you have dozens of options that would fit into a game world: an Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence, Bottomless Pits, minefields, or even just running out of dry land.

However, there are some combinations of environment and Player Character special abilities where none of the above are plausible options. For instance, how is the game supposed to stop a character from swimming out into the open sea if he lacks Super Drowning Skills?

Enter the Border Patrol, a monster or other hazard introduced specifically to prevent the player from wandering too far without resorting to the immersion-breaking Invisible Wall. This often takes the form of an Invincible Minor Minion that you can't move past, a The Brute style enemy that you have to run away from, or an obvious environmental hazard that you can't survive. In some games the Border Patrol monster can actually be killed, though it's likely to respawn if the game designers anticipated your violent yearning to be free. When done well, the player is chased away by the dangerous thing and returns to the field of play. When done badly, the player character is unavoidably killed by the whatever, occasionally suffering from Cutscene Incompetence as a monster just wanders over to the player and instantly kills him. A type of Broken Bridge. Can be Nightmare Fuel if unexpected.

Naturally, savvy (and glitch-happy) gamers just love figuring out how to get around these.

See also Beef Gate, where you are expected to be able to bypass the monster, but not right away. Metroidvania games measure your progress by what sorts of environmental hazards you can bypass.

Examples of Border Patrol include:

• Each of the Jak and Daxter games featured a giant fish, a perimeter defense robot and a purple tentacle, respectively.
• Ratchet and Clank also uses hungry fish in areas with water you're not supposed to be in.
• Similar to the examples above, Gothic II has a friendly shark come a-calling when the hero tries to swim too far from the island chain he starts on.
• In a desert area of Space Quest, there was a patrolling sand worm that would instantly eat you if you wandered away from where you were supposed to be. Gamers who misinterpreted this as a puzzle spent some time trying to kill the sand worm by various means.
  • Also, if you go to a certain screen, a meteorite falls on you.
  • Go out of bounds outside the Deltaur, and the defenses will blast you into space dust.
  • Ditto for Space Quest III, where there's a snake that eats you if you wander off course.
  • Ditto for the Droid of Death and the Sequel Police in IV.
  • And Leisure Suit Larry and the goon in the alleyways, as well as the taxis whenever you try to cross the road.
  • Sand worms play a similar role in one level of Star Wars Jedi Academy: they'll try to eat you no matter where you go, so long as the path taken involves walking on the sand.
  • And, heck, many Sierra adventure games pulled variations on this theme. King Graham could find himself sailing straight into the maw of a sea monster. Not to mention the general perils of swimming in oceans.
  • King's Quest VI justified the trope by explaining that so few people ever found the Land of the Green Isles because of dangerous currents surrounding them. Looking at the sea draws a warning of dangerous undertow, and getting your feet wet immediately starts suspenseful music; go a decent bit further and the undertow gets you.
  • Averted, however, in King's Quest III, where there is no border patrol, but the desert to the west is simply endless (as is the ocean to the east, but that will cause you to drown rather quickly).
• Since you could only drown if you were underwater, Half-Life 2 upgraded the alien leeches from the first game and placed them in water near coastal areas. They start out causing little damage, but the number of leeches increases the further you swim out, creating a sort of exponential damage curve that makes it impossible for you to survive to reach the edge of the map or skip parts of the level.
  • Since buyers of the game also gain access to the Source SDK, you can see specifically how this border patrol is managed. The entity used to enforce the border is literally called "trigger_waterydeath".
  • In a handy bit of Script Breaking, spawning the Airboat via console allows you to avert this entirely.
  • Dear Esther, a Source Engine mod turned stand-alone game, has voices whisper "Come back." if you swim out to see. You drown and respawn if you persist.
• In Treasure Trove Cove in Banjo-Kazooie you could kill Snacker the shark (who prefers one-liners to one-hit kills). He respawned after a short period of time, though.
  • But Treasure Trove Cove still needed an Invisible Wall, because that was one of the levels that allowed Kazooie to take flight.
    • Poetically, it was the level where Kazooie learned to fly in the first place. Areas such as Clanker's Cavern, Freezeezy Peak, and Click Clock Wood also allowed for flight, but those areas were more "naturally enclosed" than Treasure Trove Cove was, and thus they didn't have such a need for invisible walls. Moreover, Treasure Trove Cove tantalized the player with valuable items that were placed in the ocean, right where Snacker the shark swims.
• Nepto, encountered early in Final Fantasy III. Realistically, you can only beat him if all four of your characters are in the game's Infinity Plus One class, which you won't have at this point without cheating. You can resolve your Nepto problem by other means—and you'd better, because you can't run if you start the fight.
  • There are two other examples in the game: Bahamut is encountered early in the game (and you have to run), but you can then encounter him again shortly afterwards, and he will find new ways to destroy you (he prevents you from getting to a specific cave). You have to play through most of the game before you can take him on and beat him (in order to get him as a summon). The other example is Leviathan, who patrols a lake near the game's starting point. Much like Bahamut, he will murder you in his sleep for most of the game, until you're actually powerful enough to beat him (and thereby get to the underwater cave he guards).
• Similarly, Final Fantasy VII has the Midgar Zolom, which impedes your progress early in the game by devouring you if you try to cross a swamp. It's possible to avoid it by baiting it into a corner and sneak around, or you can save and reload every time you see the Zolom approaching, which will cause it to respawn away from you. It's even possible, with grinding and the right strategy, to slug it out with him, but the game wants you to catch a Chocobo and just outrun the thing.
• In a very specific example, the Guardian from Final Fantasy VI is invincible and won't let you into the Empire's headquarters. You have to run away, though you can fight it again much later and win.
• In Final Fantasy V you encounter a ruined castle about halfway through the game in Galuf's world. Attempting to go in right away will, unless you have done some serious Level Grinding, get you quickly and horribly killed by a monster called the Shield Dragon. This is particularly annoying if you did not save beforehand. But since said castle contains the game's Infinity Plus One Swords, this makes sense.
• In Crysis, if you swim out too far from the lovely North Korean/alien infested island, you get devoured by a HUGE shark. Not kidding. Try it.
  • Also there are ships that can see you from a mile away the moment you walk out of the game's borders and, get this, fire missiles at you. Yeah.
  • If you somehow avoid the shark and the enemy battleship, your own superiors will vaporize you with your suit's killswitch for straying outside the mission area.
• Okami has the crazy water dragon. It is actually possible to bypass the water dragon using the lily pad brush power, but damned if it's not really, REALLY difficult to do.
• Speaking of dragons, there's Within a Deep Forest, which has a Sky Dragon that will eat you if you try to cross islands, and a cat that will eat you for your powers. You can eventually avoid both. The Dragon is gone in the cold, bleak future, and the cat won't eat you if you get the ball that has NO power.
• Far Cry has the player get one shot killed by a helicopter that appears, when normal helicopters take at least 4 seconds of constant fire to kill him.
• Cauldron 2 on the ZX Spectrum had invincible lethal bats which prevented you leaving the castle in which the game was set.
• SkiFree has extremely fast Yeti that chase after and eat you if you travel too far in any direction.
  • Though it is possible to outrun by pressing f.
• World of Warcraft uses a combination of border patrols and triggered effects. Most of the coasts are patrolled by elite sharks, and if you swim past them you get a "fatigue" debuff that kills. Areas on land that haven't been fully implemented are protected by a "no man's land" debuff that teleports explorers out, and "Guardians of Blizzard" that death-touch the over-eager.
  • The sharks can be avoided by walking on water, but the fatigue debuff is unavoidable; Even player ghosts succumb to it.
• In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto IV, players who try to skip ahead to the other cities before the plot grants them access (indicated by literal Border Patrols - the bridges to these cities will be closed off and some cops will be standing behind the boundary) will find themselves suddenly slapped with a six-star wanted level, and usually be gunned down by police and/or U.S. Army helicopters shortly thereafter. I was just going for a swim, officer, honest.
  • However, the player can get around this in San Andreas by activating the cheat to clear his wanted level, then triggering the cheat to never raise it, therefore allowing him to gamble his time away in Las Venturas even before getting thrown out of Los Santos in the story.
  • On a side note, the chase continues even if you decide to back out and returns to behind the boundaries. But, due to the police search area mechanics in IV, you may pick up a motor boat in, say, Firefly Island, and drive it around the whole island. If you go across Algonquin or Alderney before they are open to you, the chase begins, but it's simpler to outrun them in the open sea than in the crammed city streets; so, simply by speeding off the cops' radar and returning to an in-game accessible area, all six stars are cleared from your screen in a short while.
• In Mercenaries, the edge of the map is designated a restricted area, and staying there too long (about five seconds) triggers a barrage of missiles from "Allied Command" that is impossible to avoid and does enough damage to kill you instantly, even if you're driving a tank when it hits.
  • It is possible, however, to doge the rockets. It takes a lot of luck and one of the Russian Mafia's twin-bladed combat helicopters from the second map area. You have to wait until they start firing, then spin the helicopter backward between the rockets. If you avoid them, you're free to fly until the second wave comes a few seconds later. If you survive again (say, using the godmode cheat), you'll run into an invisible wall.
• Scarface the World Is Yours has a shark eat Tony whole if he swims too far out. Boats are easily available, though you're shit out of luck if your boat happened to explode in the middle of the ocean and you survived the blast because you knew that shark was coming...
• In Beyond Good and Evil, there are occasional barriers than can be bypassed, Zelda-style, with various upgrades to the hovercraft. However, attempting to cross the farthest-out barriers results in a warning, followed by non-damaging shots that blast you back within the borders of the area.
  • It is, however, possible to bypass them with glitches - and drive more than half an hour to make the screen turn black and make you reappear on the other side of the map. The Dev Team Thinks of Everything.
• Some of Halo 3's multiplayer maps had this. For example Sandtrap takes place in a large desert map with no apparent barriers other than a few posts sticking up. You're more than welcome to cross past them but once you do, explosions will start happening all around you, almost always resulting in instant death. However if you are driving a fast enough vehicle, you can actually outrun the explosions, making for a quite entertaining race. Eventually however, you will come across Invisible Walls.
  • The Mythic maps added some more instances of this trope in Sandbox. Much like Sandtrap, obelisks will gun you down once you cross the warning borders. The only real difference is that the walls at the end of the level are visible. However, there's a hidden skull in the death zone. You can pick it up is by going into Forge (the level editor) and building an explosion-proof tube. Alternatively, with practice, you can dodge the blasts while in monitor mode, allowing you to move a teleporter out to the skull for pickup after you die.
  • There's also the turrets of Snowbound. While nowhere near as powerful as the ones in Sandbox, they are quite deadly. Again though, you'll come across an Invisible Wall if you manage to bypass it Hint; put a bubble shield over it or yourself.
  • Certain campaign levels, as well as multiplayer levels have invisible instant-kill barriers that prevent you from going out of bounds or shortcutting.
• Betrayal at Krondor had this in some places that were supposed to be inaccessible for the particular chapter you were playing. This was a case of "you can kill them, but they respawn instantly" (the game at least was fair and warned you if you clicked on the enemies that "there are too many of them, we can't beat them").
• The first level of Prince of Persia 2 has arguably the lamest example of this: not only will walking to the right of a certain screen lead to being immediately butchered without a chance to defend yourself, but this death happens entirely off screen.
• The Chicken Island levels in Tak and the Power of Juju are surrounded by water inhabited by Electric Jellyfish.
• In Mass Effect, straying beyond the boundary of the current planet you're exploring (roughly one square kilometer) you'll get a radio call from your ship's navigator that you need to turn back. If you keep going though, you get picked up and dropped back off at the starting point.
• The old Motocross Madness games for the PC had some kind of invisible Border Patrol, and they came packing some serious heat. Maps were usually cordoned off within Insurmountable Valleys...except, for a determined player, they were surmountable. If you managed to climb up and ride more than a few feet into the vast flat wastelands outside the valley, you would get blasted away by an invisible cannon, and then comically plummet back to the stage to a stock "bomb dropping" sound effect. Arguably an instance of highly aggressive Invisible Walls.
  • ATV Offroad Fury also used this method of Border Patrol, as well as all of the other games in the Unleashed saga and beyond.
• From Zork: It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
  • Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz, the chronologically earliest game in the series, starts out using bottomless pits the same way. Eventually you manage to seal the bottomless pits forever—driving out the grues inside and creating an even worse menace.
  • A Shout-Out to this occurs in The Journeyman Project: If you walk up the pitch-black maintenance transport tunnel, the tram runs you over, and the Have a Nice Death screen says "Well, at least you weren't eaten by a grue!" Also, if you wander anywhere you're not supposed to be, you will be spotted by humans and captured.
• Every Battlefield game has a commanding officer instruct you to return to the battle or you will be shot for being a deserter, after 10 seconds you'll take fast constant damage until you either die or return to battle. Especially diabolical if you do this in an transport aircraft or aircraft carrier and doom all of your teammates too.
• In Battlefield: Bad Company 2 when crossing the map border, you receive a radio message that enemy artillery is active in this area.
• Similarly, Star Wars Battlefront has some guy either warn you that deserters will be shot (even if you're the Emperor) or just say "Get back to the battle!" Unfortunately, you just die instantly, rather than slow draining health as in the above example.
• The various Mechwarrior titles have enforced a similar system, with two lines (orange and red) visible on your radar. Crossing the orange line triggers a warning; crossing the red one triggers explodey death.
• Spore includes a giant sea monster that will swallow you whole during Creature phase if you try to swim too far out into the ocean, even if you're flying a hundred feet above the water. There used to be a glitch where you'd start the phase in the ocean and get eaten whenever you tried to swim to land..
  • also, this is what might happen if you go to far out in the cell phase...
• In Return Fire if you fly your helicopter off the edge of the map you hear a sonar sound followed shortly be a submarine surfacing beneath you which fires a heat seeking missile that never misses and is a one hit kill. It can, however, be dodged infinitely.
• Zelda-like Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy featured the water-surrounded city of Abydos. Since Sphinx can swim, however, they filled the water surrounding him with electric eels that made the water an insta-kill. Oddly, the Hub Level is also water-surrounded, but doesn't do anything about it—you just hit an Invisible Wall.
• The 8-bit-era wireframe game Cholo was set in a post-apocalyptic world, and venturing into an area where the radioactivity level was too high for your shielding would cause your droid avatar to take damage over time. You guessed it: the edges of the (square) map were highly radioactive. (As a point of interest, by using the aeroplane or leadcoat droids, you could get over the edge of the map before receiving terminal damage. Whereupon, you would wrap around and appear on the other side of the map.)
• Might And Magic IX had an example after a ship wreck with tons of sea serpents that not only swarm if you swim towards them would shoot at you while you were at the shore making running away the only practical option.
• The Sea-doo racing game Splashdown features giant squids which grab your racer and fling him crashing back towards the map if you wander too far.
• Commissars will shoot you dead in the Soviet campaign of Call of Duty if you run from the battle.
  • In addition, several levels in the Call of Duty series were lined with minefields around the combat zones. In one level set in Cherynobyl, wandering off the path would result in getting hit by a 'lethal pocket of radiation.' In the Scrappy Level "One Shot, One Kill", you will be ripped apart by guard dogs if you go behind the Ferris wheel.
• Straying too far from the main area in the text adventure New York will get you murdered.
• Fallout 3 features this trope when trying to get into Vault 87 - the only way there is a roundabout path through Little Lamplight. If you try to take the direct route there, you'll start absorbing ludicrous amounts of radiation - as high as 3,000 rads/second (for comparison, taking increments of 200 rads will weaken your skills, and exceeding 1,000 rads is fatal - meaning you can die by standing around for 0.3 second.) It turns out that this is all for naught, too. Even if you have enough Rad-Away and Rad-X to nullify and reduce radiation, the way to your destination is blocked by a Locked Door.
  • In the original Fallout you took damage from dehydration if you wandered off too far without stopping at known locations, unless you carried water flasks. The second game in the series dropped the idea, but still had powerful random encounters near late-game areas. In both games, the entire world map was accessible to you the moment you left the starting location, so some system (easily subvertible with enough knowledge and/or luck) was necessary to prevent too early exploration and diverging from the intended path.
• In Prototype, trying to cross one of the bridges to the mainland will get you bombarded by an off-screen air raid. However, trying to cross in the water will inexplicably stop your air powers from working and then jump you back to the land for no discernible reason (they give what would be a plausible reason not to be able to cross the water, but it would only make sense if the water killed you.) Also, trying to use the helicopter to get out will result in a warning to turn back and then getting blown up.
  • It is possible to dodge the bridge's air raid long enough to reach an invisible wall. If you try to just swim away from Manhattan without using the bridges or vehicles then you'll also meet with an Invisible Wall.
  • In addition, trying to get to the Reagan aircraft carrier before it comes into play in the story (only possible with a hammer throw) will lock the Reagan's rather powerful cannons on you. These knock you back substantially and will one-shot you if you don't have the upgrade that puts you in overdrive upon death.
  • The jumping happens in any deep water, for no apparent reason. It also takes the character a few seconds to jump out, even in the ponds and streams of the parks (which can't be the 30–40 feet deep that time suggests).
• Unreal Tournament 2004 will blast you with the Ion Cannon on the more open maps if you go a-wandering. The firing delay means that if you're driving a manta flat-out it's possible to taunt it into firing and only taking survivable splash damage.
• A temporary Border Patrol can be found in the Lothlorien area in The Lord of the Rings Online. You first have to gain the elves trust to enter their forest. If you chose to ignore the guards warning, you get pincushioned by arrows raining from the treetops the moment you try to cross the small river.
  • There's another one on the borders of the Anduin. The only way in or out is by using boats - if you try to swim the river, orc archers on the far side will kill you dead. The boats are gated by a quest chain, so that only those who buy the Mirkwood content can reach it.
  • In Angmar, there is a line of Watching Stones that applies quick-killing damage-over-time effects when you cross it. The "wall of death" was a rite of passage for many when the game was released. Like others, completing a quest line will allow you to cross the line.
• In Far Cry 2, if you wandered off the edge of the playing area, your character would faint from dehydration, and inexplicably wakes up back within the borders of the map. If you drove off the edge in a vehicle, you'd faint, then wake up within the map's borders with the vehicle missing.
• As mentioned above, the new Bionic Commando has a tendency to kill you with radiation if actually try to explore the city the game takes place in.
• In RuneScape, you can enter a dark area without a light source if you want to, but you won't be able to see shit, and you'll also be attacked by a horde of unseen tiny insects that rapidly take your health down.
• The first Mercenaries game had Allied jetfighters and Naboo starfighters from Star Wars (LucasArts published the game) attack the player relentlessly if he/she tries to swim out of the game's boundaries.
• Mobile Suit Gundam 0079: Rise From the Ashes for the Sega Dreamcast used simple common sense: If you left the mission area, so would your team, and the mission would be aborted.
• Borderlands had a Border Patrol consisting of a warning by the Crimson Lance corporation, warning you that if you go any further, you WILL be bombarded. Going any further results in you losing some money and being transported to the nearest New-U Station.
  • Many areas have impassable cliffs (up or down) to keep you in. Some also have high-powered looking turrets with double laser sites that lock on to you if you approach the edge. Also, it's a warning from the Crimson Lance, which is the Atlas Corporation's military division.
• In Resident Evil, if you try leaving the mansion through the front door you'll be stopped by a zombie dog that's always waiting there, even though you could just shoot it.
  • The Gamecube remake has one of the dogs enter the mansion if you open the front door, with several more dogs visible outside. After killing the dog that comes into the mansion, your character will refuse to open the front door again.
  • In Resident Evil 2 there is a similar moment where you could exit the police station (near where you find the valve) but are blocked by zombies, however you can kill them but the game says it's too dark to see anyway. The implication here is that outside that door there's just too damn many zombies.
• In G-Nome players are restricted to within the game area by the Orbital defense kill zone. Should a player wander too far outside, a computer voice will warn the player. If the player continues, the computer will say, "Have a nice day", and the player's mecha will be destroyed by a huge laser blast, presumably from a space-based weapon.
• A Russian FPS Truth About the 9th Company reenacts a combat that took place in the War in Afghanistan. If you move too far away from the action zone and cross an invisible border, the game abruptly and summarily ends as you are court-martialled for desertion.
• The Saboteur: Some borders of the map that aren't blocked by mountains or water appear striped on the map and are named as 'War Zones' if you enter them. They do indeed look like battlefields, containing anti-tank barriers, scorched vegetation and ruined buildings. Protrude too far into these zones, and fighter-bombers fly over and drop insta-kill payloads and bullets on you. This is particularly jarring because on any difficulty below 'Feckin' Hard' your character can take an inordinate amount of punishment. If you survive this (relatively simple as the bombs are inaccurate), you'll eventually meet an Invisible Wall.
• In Free Space, flying too far from the origin on the coordinate grid results first in a message that you are leaving the zone of engagement, then a suddenly self-destructing ship.
• In Soldier of Fortune II's Colombia levels, if you fall too far behind or go too far ahead of your allies, they will yell "Execute him!" and shoot you dead. Worse, there's a glitch that can get them stuck and make the level Unwinnable.
• The thing outside the front door in Alone in the Dark, and the Chthonian Worm that blocks the secret passage from the basement (which you need to unlock anyway to get back in later).
• Pilotwings: "Stay Inside of Course!" If you keep going, you get "Out of Course" and fail the event.
• In I, Robot, saucers patrol the edges of the shooting sections, making it a very dangerous place, should you wander there.
• In the graphical Roguelike Ragnarok (no relation to Ragnarok Online), the world is bounded by an endless ocean. If you go into it, however, the world serpent Jormungandr appears and gives chase. He is lightning fast, completely unkillable and will one-hit kill you if you come close to him or attack him (even from the other side of the screen, despite having no ranged attacks); the only escape is to rush back into the world proper before he reaches you.
  • Also, if you use a potion of phasing to walk off the edge of the map, you will fall to Niflheim and take massive damage. (If you're very lucky, you could survive the fall, but then you'll wake up in Niflheim, surrounded by Hel and her minions...)
• In the first Gears of War, going into dark areas gets you eaten by the Kryll (killer bats). Unfortunately, going through dark areas before the Kryll get to you is required at some points of the game.
• Dead Meets Lead is infamous among Steam gamers for employing malaria as a deterring agent for players who so much as stray off the beaten path!
• Call of Duty Black Ops subverts the usual Insurmountable Waist High Fence or Nonstandard Game Over method of keeping players inside the multiplayer or campaign map, respectively, with the "Jungle" multiplayer map. The map is surrounded by the aforementioned Insurmountable Waist High Fence, except for one open area (marked with a skull-and-crossbones sign) that leads into a rice paddy. Ignoring the sign and walking into said paddy, however, is a very bad idea. To add insult to injury, your death is listed as "suicide".
  • However, there aren't actually mines until a few yards in. Guess where a good place to put a SAM Turret is?
• Some levels of the first Serious Sam game have the player receive sunburn damage when wandering too far into the desert. In Serious Sam 3, open stages are patrolled by a sand whale who eventually comes in handy.
• The original Airforce Delta features a level involving flight through a large canyon to reach the main target area; flying above the canyon's cliffs would result in a barrage of surface-to-air missiles spammed toward your plane until it's finally shot down.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: As with many other MMOs, attempting to go outside the map boundaries results in a warning and then gradual damage, in this case in the form of a stacking damage-over-time debuff that kills you at five stacks (somewhere between ten and twenty seconds). This is occasionally justified by implying that you are heading into a lake/ocean, or that the weather is taking a turn for the worse: on Tatooine a sandstorm kicks up, and on Hoth and Ilum a blizzard appears. In a handful of cases it is necessary to head into these zones to find certain hidden collectibles; usually it's one only needs to traverse a nominal strip intended to fool you into thinking there is nothing there, but at least once you need to come within an inch of your life to claim your prize.
  • In the Operation Explosive Conflict (an Operation being an instanced dungeon designed for eight to sixteen people) the group at one point needs to pass through a series of trenches as there is a full-scale battle implied to be occurring in the background. If a player should somehow scale the sides of the trench, an Exhaustion Zone warning will show - and a few seconds later the player will be killed instantly by what appears to be an orbital strike.

• Non video game example: in Robo Rally, any robot that wanders off the game board is instantly terminated.